Planet13 - 7:15 pm on Jul 23, 2011 (gmt 0)

Thank You, Rhinofish. for the advice:

I can see your points and agree with them.

It seems to me that the ONE benefit of doing it independently through an in-house system is that you can target "virgin" sites (i.e., Those sites that are closely related to the topic but don't actively look for affiliate opportunities or ways to monetize their sites).

So maybe a two-pronged approach is best? Using both a network such as shareasale, and also using the in-house approach for those people who are "affiliate illiterate" since I will be able to set everything up for them on our end and then all they will have to do is paste our code onto their sites.

Since doing it independently would be time consuming, I think I would use it as a "fallback" to my regular link building requests. So if I ask for a link from a site but they balk at giving away something for free, then I might suggest an affiliate link instead...